There will always be a push and pull between businesses and government—it’s natural.
Whether we’re talking about calorie counts on menus, high taxes on cigarettes or pushing telecom giants to make service available to everyone instead of just certain wealthy buildings and neighborhoods, government will always have reasons to impose rules: to protect consumers, to ensure a market is fair, to discourage activities that harm the public. Businesses, naturally, push back—but we usually find a balance that makes sense.
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
article continues below advertisement
But when our city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission recently proposed to do something pretty basic—collect more data from regulated livery and cab rides, including e-hail services—the pushback from e-hail businesses was over the top.
Here’s the issue: The TLC approved a rule last summer to ensure taxi, livery and car service drivers aren’t on the road for so long at a stretch that they’re too tired to drive safely. But to update that rule and make it more enforceable, the TLC wants data on where and when these vehicles make drop-offs, so they can track how long drivers are behind the wheel.
This seems like a no-lose situation. Data sharing requires no inconvenience, no new tax, no interruption of your trip. But the e-hail companies are fighting this, charging that the TLC is attempting some kind of Big Brother-style overreach to invade our privacy and monitor individuals’ movements.
These are odd criticisms from companies like Uber, whose own privacy controversies include a settlement with Attorney General Eric Schneiderman after the company was investigated for how it collected riders’ personal information and made it available to company executives in a map display called “God view.” But even leaving that aside, the complaints over the proposal TLC is making don’t pass the laugh test.
Under the proposal, traditional car service companies like Carmel and Dial 7 and e-hail services like Uber and Lyft would all need to submit drop-off locations with dates and times. No identifying information on passengers would be reported to the TLC in the data set, and the locations would only be made public at the neighborhood level (think “Midtown East” or “Sunset Park”), without the specific address or even the street name.
Companies already do this with pick-up information, and some voluntarily share drop-off data as well.
Since the TLC had credit-card readers installed in yellow and green cabs, the pick-up and drop-off information for those cars has been reported to the TLC automatically for every ride. The city never knows who the passenger is, and only the companies that handle credit-card payment in the taxi have rider information.
But this data, without any personal info, has been a civic boon since the city began collecting it in 2007. Traffic analysts, policymakers, journalists, academics and data scientists have been able to use the information to calculate traffic speeds, pursue consumer complaints and even find lost items in cabs ranging from phones to wedding rings and beloved children’s blankets.
The TLC and its chairwoman, Meera Joshi, are leaders on data and transparency both within our city government and on the national stage. Through our city’s Open Data platform more than a billion TLC trip records have already been made public online—and that data can be used by anyone. I fought hard to pass the city’s Open Data Law and create the Open Data platform for the public to access city data sets precisely because I knew smart people in business, government, academia and the civic hacking community could use them to build new apps, conduct new research, and deliver exciting new benefits for New Yorkers.
New Yorkers know this is a complicated city. Transparency and research—from a good old-fashioned traffic study to the collection of large data sets—help us meet the challenges that complexity creates, and even take advantage of them. So it makes sense to do that now, with data on car-service pick-ups and drop-offs, to help make sure passengers and drivers—and everyone who needs to share our streets with them—are safe.
Gale A. Brewer is Manhattan borough president and was the founding chair of the City Council’s Committee on Technology.
There will always be a push and pull between businesses and government—it’s natural.
Whether we’re talking about calorie counts on menus, high taxes on cigarettes or pushing telecom giants to make service available to everyone instead of just certain wealthy buildings and neighborhoods, government will always have reasons to impose rules: to protect consumers, to ensure a market is fair, to discourage activities that harm the public. Businesses, naturally, push back—but we usually find a balance that makes sense.
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
But when our city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission recently proposed to do something pretty basic—collect more data from regulated livery and cab rides, including e-hail services—the pushback from e-hail businesses was over the top.
Here’s the issue: The TLC approved a rule last summer to ensure taxi, livery and car service drivers aren’t on the road for so long at a stretch that they’re too tired to drive safely. But to update that rule and make it more enforceable, the TLC wants data on where and when these vehicles make drop-offs, so they can track how long drivers are behind the wheel.
This seems like a no-lose situation. Data sharing requires no inconvenience, no new tax, no interruption of your trip. But the e-hail companies are fighting this, charging that the TLC is attempting some kind of Big Brother-style overreach to invade our privacy and monitor individuals’ movements.
These are odd criticisms from companies like Uber, whose own privacy controversies include a settlement with Attorney General Eric Schneiderman after the company was investigated for how it collected riders’ personal information and made it available to company executives in a map display called “God view.” But even leaving that aside, the complaints over the proposal TLC is making don’t pass the laugh test.
Under the proposal, traditional car service companies like Carmel and Dial 7 and e-hail services like Uber and Lyft would all need to submit drop-off locations with dates and times. No identifying information on passengers would be reported to the TLC in the data set, and the locations would only be made public at the neighborhood level (think “Midtown East” or “Sunset Park”), without the specific address or even the street name.
Companies already do this with pick-up information, and some voluntarily share drop-off data as well.
Since the TLC had credit-card readers installed in yellow and green cabs, the pick-up and drop-off information for those cars has been reported to the TLC automatically for every ride. The city never knows who the passenger is, and only the companies that handle credit-card payment in the taxi have rider information.
But this data, without any personal info, has been a civic boon since the city began collecting it in 2007. Traffic analysts, policymakers, journalists, academics and data scientists have been able to use the information to calculate traffic speeds, pursue consumer complaints and even find lost items in cabs ranging from phones to wedding rings and beloved children’s blankets.
The TLC and its chairwoman, Meera Joshi, are leaders on data and transparency both within our city government and on the national stage. Through our city’s Open Data platform more than a billion TLC trip records have already been made public online—and that data can be used by anyone. I fought hard to pass the city’s Open Data Law and create the Open Data platform for the public to access city data sets precisely because I knew smart people in business, government, academia and the civic hacking community could use them to build new apps, conduct new research, and deliver exciting new benefits for New Yorkers.
New Yorkers know this is a complicated city. Transparency and research—from a good old-fashioned traffic study to the collection of large data sets—help us meet the challenges that complexity creates, and even take advantage of them. So it makes sense to do that now, with data on car-service pick-ups and drop-offs, to help make sure passengers and drivers—and everyone who needs to share our streets with them—are safe.
Gale A. Brewer is Manhattan borough president and was the founding chair of the City Council’s Committee on Technology.
Sign up for our FREE daily email newsletter. A summary of the day’s top business and political headlines from the newsroom of Crain’s New York Business.
More Newsletters ›
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
